That’s what the McStay case is getting now, with the discovery last week of the family’s skeletal remains in shallow graves near Victorville.

That high desert town is in San Bernardino County, which is why detectives there have taken over the investigation. They’ll inherit the voluminous files the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department compiled during three years spent trying to solve the mysterious disappearance.

They’ll also inherit a new question — not “Where are the McStays?” but “Who killed them?”

The Fallbrook residents — Joseph, 40, Summer, 43, and their sons, Gianni, 4, and Joey Jr., 3 — were last seen on Feb. 4, 2010. Four days later, their Isuzu Trooper was towed as an abandoned vehicle from a parking lot in San Ysidro. Surveillance video showed a foursome that resembled the McStays walking across the border.

That led investigators here to believe the family traveled voluntarily into Mexico, where perhaps something bad happened to them. Seven months ago, detectives turned the case over to the FBI and its international resources.

It was always a theory with large holes, as detectives readily admitted. It was their best educated guess. And, as the discovery of the family’s bodies would seem to suggest, it was wrong.

To some critics, that’s reason enough to turn the investigation over to someone else. Patrick McStay, Joseph’s father, said he considers San Diego County detectives’ handling of the case incompetent. He’s filed complaints with the department and is contemplating a lawsuit.

Rick Baker, a former Fallbrook resident who wrote “No Goodbyes,” a controversial book about the disappearance published earlier this year, said the detectives “botched it from the beginning” by treating it as a missing-persons case and not a crime.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said the department did “everything within our power to resolve this,” spending thousands of hours chasing down reported sightings, poring over the family’s financial records, interviewing anyone with any connection to the McStays.

“Any good detective does not lock the door on one area of investigation,” she said. “You keep all the doors open, and that’s exactly what they did.”

Still, she acknowledged there’s merit in the case going to a new group of detectives.

“I believe a fresh set of eyes will always be good in an investigation,” she said.

Lingering questions

At a news conference Friday, San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon declined to talk about the cause of death but said the case is being treated as a homicide. The graves, uncovered after an off-road motorcyclist found scattered bones nearby, contained clothing and other physical evidence, McMahon said. He declined to be more specific.

Baker, the book author, said he’s been told by “law enforcement sources” that Joseph and Summer were bound with electric cord.

The passage of time makes the investigation challenging, according to Dan Berglund, a veteran San Diego homicide detective not affiliated with the case. “Evidence is lost because of time, or it degrades,” he said.

On the plus side, he said, the investigation now has a focus: murder. Detectives can go over all the evidence with an eye toward motive. They can zero in on activities — gas station receipts, witness statements, surveillance video — around Victorville when the family disappeared.

“Maybe somebody saw something, a car out there at night, that didn’t mean anything at the time but will mean something now,” he said.

The detectives will also have to sort through the familiar mound of clues that made the disappearance so perplexing and turned it into such a hot topic in the cable TV world of Nancy Grace and Geraldo Rivera and in the Internet chat rooms for amateur sleuths.

Why did the family leave in such a hurry? When detectives first went to the house on Avocado Vista Lane, about 10 days after the family was last seen, they found a carton of eggs and a rotten banana on the kitchen counter. There were bowls of popcorn in the living room. But no sign of forced entry and no sign of a struggle.

If the family left home on Feb. 4, and their Trooper wound up in San Ysidro on Feb. 8, what was happening during those four days? Were they already dead? Were the parking lot attendants wrong about when the SUV arrived? Who drove it there, and why?

And if it wasn’t the McStays crossing the border on the grainy surveillance film, why did someone use the family computer eight days before the disappearance to search a website about passport requirements for children traveling in Mexico? Why, a month before that, was Summer looking into buying Spanish-language software?

Relatives and friends of the family never believed much in the left-on-their-own theory. They said the McStays would not have gone off without their two dogs, Bear and Digger. They wouldn’t have abandoned $100,000 in bank accounts, and Joseph wouldn’t have stopped contacting his teenage son from an earlier marriage. Why, they wondered, was Summer looking at evite.com for birthday invitations on Feb. 3 if she was going to vanish the next day?

“When they went missing, after the first few days I knew this wasn’t going to end good,” said Joseph’s father. “I just had that feeling. You hear about the mothers who have special intuition. When it comes to Joey, I have that.”

But fear was matched by hope, and the steady stream of reported sightings — Montana, Indiana, Baja, North Carolina — buoyed them. They handed out fliers along the border and sent a private investigator into Mexico. They set up a website, mcstayfamily.org, and a Facebook page for people to send information and post words of encouragement.

After the bodies were discovered, a tearful Mike McStay, Joseph’s brother, said, “This is not really the outcome we were looking for, but it gives us courage to know that they’re together and they’re in a better place.”

Alternate theories

There’s never been any shortage of alternate theories about what happened.

Baker and numerous Internet sleuths pointed fingers at Summer, using emails she’d sent to various people to depict her as hotheaded, manipulative and vindictive. They suggested she had either killed her husband or had it done, and then took off with the boys.

Others speculated that both parents had been killed and the boys kidnapped. There’s been talk of Mexican drug cartels. And some have suggested money was a motive by raising questions about the post-disappearance handling of Joseph’s personal property and business affairs — he ran a water-fountain company — by relatives and co-workers.

Few, if any, had imagined all four bodies winding up in graves near Victorville, 105 miles from the family’s Fallbrook home, in the opposite direction from Mexico.

Baker has pulled his book off amazon.com, and on his blog he is offering refunds to any customers who want it.